Financial transaction cards (or, for this application, simply “cards”) may be credit cards, stored value cards (also known as gift cards, prepaid cards, shopping cards, loyalty or reward cards, and so on) or other objects which function similarly (e.g., an object bearing a barcode, magnetic stripe, RFID chip or other feature recognizable at the point of sale to activate a financial account or subsequently perform or track a transaction or activity). Commonly shaped and sized “cards” have the form factor known as CR80, but CR50, CR79, CR90, and CR200 form factors also are common. Other, non-standard shapes and sizes exist as well. Cards may include a magnetic stripe, bar code or other indicia for identification, data transfer, account activation, verification, or other purposes.
The cards may or may not have value associated with them, i.e., the value may be already in the account (“on the card”) before purchase, or it may be initially added (“loaded”) or subsequently added (“reloaded”) at point of sale or though any other form of data transmission used for electronic commerce.
Cards preloaded with value that are activated by indicia on a package containing the card represent a security (theft) risk. For example, prior to authorized purchase, a thief may access the activation indicia without physically removing the card from the package. The legitimate activation indicia on the package may be replaced with activation indicia correlated not with the legitimate card in the package, but instead with an illegitimate card (account) controlled by the thief. When the thief sees that the illegitimate account has been “activated” with the value that was intended for the account correlated with the legitimate card in the possession of the purchaser, the thief has stolen the amount of that transaction. The card within the package has not been activated at all.